HP ProLiant MicroServer - a quick pictorial tour

Also known as the HP ProLiant N36L, this is a new small 4 bay server from HP, based on an AMD NEO N36L CPU and RS785E/SB820M chipset combination. The base unit comes with a single 160GB HD and 1GB of ECC memory(as a single stick).

With that out of the way, here's some quick pictures I took. The camera's batteries were on their way out so I only used the flash for 2 of the shots. I won't, however, make excuses for my poor photography skills.

The front of the unit. The HP logo glows blue during normal operation however it does flash red on initial power up. This leads me to suspect that it's controllable, and could be used as a form of alerting:

Door open with the front bays exposed:

The backplane the drives connect to:

And the wiring for the backplane. It's not entirely clear but each port of the backplane has a single SATA data and power connector:

The type A USB port and 8087 "minisas" connector for the drive bays. There's also a normal SATA port to the right for connecting whatever you decide to put into the 5.25" bay at the top:

Motherboard removed from the case and a drive in a caddy next to it:

Another shot of the 8087 socket and type A USB port:

The PCI-E slots. You can just about make out the text near the 16x slot that indicates it'll provide a maximum of 25W. So no GTX480's:

Top removed to show the 5.25" bay. It takes standard 5.25" drives and the front panel blanking plate is fully removable. So you could use a 4x2.5" hot swap caddy if you want:

And finally, a shot of the back PCI slot area:

There's a little flap above the retention brackets that flips down and can also be unclipped. The top of the PCI slots are open, so a PCI card can be installed without having to open the entire case, as long as the card is no wider than the PCI bracket.

The BIOS is AMI based(so, if you're familiar with HP server hardware this is more along the lines of the DL1xx stuff rather than the DL3xx), and is fairly basic. You have options to disable bank interleaving, switch to single core mode, C1E and Powernow enable/disable and switching the SATA controller between AHCI, IDE and RAID mode. There are also a few informational pages showing temperatures, fan speed and motherboard voltages.

Individual drives, running multiple simultaneous dd's where appropriate. I was just making sure that the SB<->NB link wasn't gimped in some way. The figures suggest that it's the standard ALink Express you find on the desktop chipsets and not something lower bandwidth.

I've edited the original post to make that a little clearer. Sorry.

Quote:

How big is the PSU for it, and any idea on the actual fan specs/fan control (at the least are the fan/fans 2-wire, 3-wire, or 4-wire?)

200W IIRC. I'll double check on Monday when I'm back at work. And the fan is a 4 pin PWM model. I didn't have time to completely pull the chassis apart, but I intend to on Monday so I'll be able find the model of the fan as well.

Hat Monster wrote:

You can put as big a video card as you like in it: They all use external power.

Er, what? GTX480 is 6 pin + 8 pin, which gives you 225W. NVidia gives a TDP figure of 250W for the 480, which means *at a minimum* the card is going to draw 25W from the PCI-E slot.

Qoumran wrote:

I would like to see some tests on power usage if you have access to equipment to measure it.

Sure, on Monday.

Quote:

Any impressions of how noisy the machine is?

HP quote 22dba, which matches up with my impressions without drives. I certainly couldn't hear it about the ambient noise floor in the office, which is ~29db when the air con is off.

However, the case has zero dampening apart from some hard rubber feet(whose purpose appears to be to stop it slipping around rather than isolate the case), so if you use high vibration drives(like the WD5000AAKS's I was testing with) it's going to happily transmit that vibration. The WD15EARS were fine, although I only tested with two in the chassis.

This would be great as a ceton DVR box if there was a proper GPU that could fit into the low-profile, 25w or less category. Seems the nVidia GT 210 may work, but it's not quite powerful enough for HD w/ post-processing.

Not a single test (that I'm aware of, that is) has managed to measure more than 180W from it, easily in the range of its power connectors. Also, every 480 I've seen has no power conversion components hooked into the PCIe slot.

NV is pretty well known for over-stating its power requirements, that sweet little box should handle the creaky underperforming 480 just fine. Why you'd want to is another question.

You can get an ATI Radeon HD 5570 in low-profile single-slot and the 5450 is passively cooled even. Looks like GT 430 in Nvidia land.

The problem is the 25W limit, rather than the width of the card. It's possible you could down clock a GT430's 3D clocks(video decode uses 2D clocks, de-interlacers/filters tend to use the 3D shader clocks) to get within the draw limit while still maintaining enough performance to still do the more advanced de-int.

Otherwise you're likely stuck with the GT210 and AMD 5450, which will just give you accelerated decode and limited filters. Which may not be such a big deal, depending on your source material.

A day late, but some power measurements. This is using a simple Kill-A-Watt type device, so accuracy is +/- 5%. All readings are AC draw, actual DC draw will be lower but I've not got a reliable way to measure the (in)efficiency of the PSU.

All readings are with the boot drive connected to the onboard SATA port, but powered using a separate supply. So the readings are purely for the motherboard, CPU and memory.

With 4 Samsung HD103SJ's(1TB, 7200rpm, 32MB) and a single Seagate VB0160EAVEQ(160GB, 7200rpm, 8MB), peak power usage of 65W was hit by writing to all 5 drives at the same time and running a single instance of burnK7.

Some additional notes: the 5th onboard SATA port is actually connected via the ATI PATA controller(and uses the atiixp driver under Linux). I'm not sure if there's a bridge chip involved, but it doesn't seem to impact throughput much.

I did some additional throughput tests, using 4 60GB OCZ Vertex 2(SF based), and got an aggregate throughput of 572MB/sec write, 768MB/sec read which largely confirms the NB<->SB link isn't neutered in comparison to the desktop chipsets.

AHCI vs atiixp controller, the rates are 147/198MB/s(AHCI) and 144/186MB/s(atiixp) for a single SSD, for write and read.

The PSU itself is a Delta DPS-200PB-177A, rev 01F. According to the sticker, the rails support:

3.3V - 6A5VSB - 2A5V - 12A12V - 13A

5V+3.3V max 60W5V+3.3V+12V max 190W

Input voltage is 110-240V, ~3.5A.

The 120mm fan is also a Delta, specifically a AFB1212VH, rated as 12V/0.60A.

I think that about covers all the questions. If I've missed something, you'll have to ask again.

I set up one of these a couple weeks ago running Small Business Server 2008 for a small office. I had issues with the RAID driver, but after getting that figured out it was smooth sailing. Pretty nice little server for the money.

Any idea what the connectors are on either side of the front panel pins? DVI output possibly? They don't seem to be used in the stock configuration. The pics are too blurry for me to read any of the PCB labels.